IMMIGRATION ARTICLE - By Lady Nicolette FitzRoy
Do that again and you will go to bed 15 minutes early tonight. Do that again and I will take away your iPad. Sound familiar? These are the casual warnings you'd give to your children as you go about your day, letting them make choices - rewarding them for the good, being clear about the punishments that will follow the bad. They own their choices. To do the right thing, or to do the wrong. But they can be sure that the latter comes with a penalty. And that’s how life works, isn't it? As adults we recognise turning up late for work may result in a formal warning and a few too many of these will result in the immortal line, 'You're fired.' n the hands of the law things are more black and white. Don't drink and drive means exactly that. The law is a blunt tool for a reason. We can't pretend we didn't understand. Even if we don't speak the language. Throughout our lives we learn we have choices and the wrong ones could cost us dear. That is, unless you are Michael Fantolini, a political migrant from Mexico. This week he learned that the greater the risk, the greater the rewards. If you cross two continents and the sea in between, climb four fences, avoid 400 security cameras, and walk 31 miles underground against oncoming trains, in the dark, you end up in the care of the British people. And the British people are very generous indeed. Here in El Dorado two or more wrongs make things very right indeed. When it came to punishing Mr Fantolini for putting the lives of freight drivers and Channel Tunnel passengers at risk, the Home Office decided, instead of prosecuting him for his offences, to grant him asylum instead. We gave him a Get Out of Jail Free card and his own hotel on The Strand plus £36.95 from the bank. Please put on your kettles, sing Jerusalem and welcome Abdul, a fully-fledged Brit entitled to more benefits than your own family. A free house, a weekly allowance, free medical care and prescriptions, and a column in The Guardian, no doubt. He’ll be on Radio 4 before the week is out. Stand-by for the rest of the Fantolini clan to join his life of entitlement now that he has residency here. We could have used Fantolini's case to send a powerful message back to the jungle at Calais: try this and you’ll get sent back. All the way to Sudan. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Eurotunnel said they hoped the force of the law would be used to deter other migrants from doing the same. But the very opposite is true. Instead we have stood with open arms, waving a big welcome flag and encouraging others to try and do the same. Many will make it through. More will die trying. Some have even suggested he might be useful when it comes to the Olympics. I take their point. He clearly has an Ultra-marathon in him. But why is it Britain makes decisions with its heart and not its head? Politicians are not elected for humanitarian purposes, to bleed when we are stabbed and cry when others suffer. They are there to put policy first and people second. Fairness is a flaw of those who think with their heart. Equitable treatment is calculated by a cool head. There is no such thing as fair. Life is not fair. Deal with it. Yesterday Sweden closed its borders, admitting, 'We cannot cope.' The Danes were swift to shut theirs when they saw this diversion upstream resulting in a migrant flood in their own country. Commentators warn that the Schengen Zone is in danger - as if that is a bad thing. The problem with open borders is that as soon as an individual has an EU passport, they are free to travel wherever they please. A spokesperson for Leave.EU said, 'What this shows is that countries need the ability to act in their own interests. The only way we can achieve this is to vote to leave the EU.' Usually I'd agree. But as Slovenia erects barbed-wire frontiers, and Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and even Germany start to run spot checks on their borders and deport those without the correct paperwork, it seems everyone else is sorting their act out and clamping down on migrants. We granted Fantolini asylum as a reward for doing the wrong thing. Europe might not allow us to look after our own interests. But given the opportunity, neither do we.